Hey y'all!
One of my favorite family holiday traditions is making sugar cookies! We always try to make royal icing, and it always ends up super thin and runny (boo!). This year, I have been following quite a few people who decorate the most GORGEOUS cookies, so I knew I had to step up my game if I was planning to post these babies on instagram. I decided to use new recipes from the ones that I normally use because I really wanted soft sugar cookies and I wanted a different icing (the one I used in the past had way too much almond or vanilla or something or another).
Rolled Sugar Cookies - I got my recipe here. They were super soft and tasted great! My only change to this recipe is that the thicker rolled cookies were much softer and I wanted to eat all of them, so you should probably do that. This recipe calls for an ungreased cookie sheet, but I used parchment paper which helped the bottoms become a really pretty light golden color.
Royal Icing - I started with Martha Stewart's recipe here. I will tell you to NOT use nearly as much water as she calls for. Honestly, I probably used half the water it called for and it still wasn't super thick. I would add a tiny bit at a time until you get the consistency you want.
This was my first time to really use the outline and flooding techniques successfully (honestly, I think I used to try the flooding without the outlining...P.S. that does NOT work). If you don't know how to do this, you want to have a thicker icing to outline your shape and then thin it out (i.e. add a tiny bit of water) to "flood" the outline. This results in a smooth even finish for your cookies! A couple of other things that I learned were that if there are bubbles in your icing, you can use a toothpick to pop those suckers and that you want to make sure the icing is COMPLETELY dry before you put them in tins (mine weren't 100% dry so some ended up having crinkles in the icing).
I recognized that I was too obsessive to get into decorating these intricately in the time frame I had to make them, so they ended up being relatively simple. Maybe next year when I can space out my baking days a little better! I'm still pretty proud of the outcome! What do you think?
By the time I got to the candy canes, I was just done with being a perfectionist and almost out of icing, so I just striped those with the light blue and red. They ended up being perfect for people who don't like as much icing though!
I think this may become an every holiday tradition, not just Christmas. Does your family make cookies for the holidays? Or have any special recipes?
Until next time,
No comments:
Post a Comment